Tim Winton - The Turning

It’s nothing, sport.

You really seem sad.

New Year’s Eve.

School’s not for another month.

Not for me, sport.

Posh school, then.

No, she said. I’m not going back. A few months on the farm.

She put a finger over his mouth to stop him talking and she held him like that while she socked back another drink. He closed his lips over her finger.

Ah, she said. A kiss. But what about this one?

She held up the stub of her ring finger in the moonlight before him and Vic took her wrist and drew it to him. He felt her whole hand across his face as he took the stump into his mouth. It blotted out the sky, it blacked the glare of moonlight and tasted of salt and ginger and sugar all at once. There was no texture of a fingerprint against his tongue, just a slick smoothness that made his blood bubble.

Come here, she said. What the hell. Auld Lang Syne.

She kissed him and her mouth was soft and hungry as she bent down to reach him and he heard the bottle gurgle out into the sand where their knees had knocked it while her tongue found his and he shaped his mouth to hers. He let his hands settle on her hips, felt his head cradled in her fingers and he swam up into her, happy and awake as he’d ever been. When she broke off and kissed the top of his head he was bereft. He pressed his brow to her throat and she dug her fingers in his hair and drew up her shirt so that her breasts shone in the moonlight. She guided him down and he kissed them. They were full against his face and when he drew the nipple into his mouth she murmured and gasped and finally, confoundingly, began to cry.

It was midnight when he got back to the bonfire. The others were singing and kissing and nobody asked him where he’d been. They were Langs singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the cousins were asleep on their feet.

Vic woke in the night to the sound of puffing and moaning. Everyone was in bed now but a camp stretcher was grinding and squeaking. He felt his mother stir beside him. It was Auntie Cleo panting over there. Vic saw her legs up in the moonlight.

Oh, for God’s sake, whispered his mother.

He listened until his lap was wet and the sheet clammy around him. Ernie gave one sharp grunt, like a man who’d suddenly remembered something, and in the quiet that followed, while the sea crawled against the shore and the moon spilled through holes in the tarp overhead, Vic thought of Melanie and the strangeness of her tears and the long, silent walk back to camp. He hadn’t hurt her, he knew that much, but he sensed she was in some kind of pain, something important that was out of his reach, the way everything is when you’re just a stupid kid and all the talk is over your head. He thought of the hollow between her breasts, pressed his face to the pillow and slept.

His father woke him at dawn. The boat was already afloat in the shallows. Ernie yanked at the outboard’s starter rope.

They were out in deep water before Vic was properly awake. The water was clear; you could see sandy bottom in the green holes in the reef. Kelp rose yellow and brown from jagged lumps and fish sprayed in all directions.

When they came upon their first float, Vic’s old man gaffed it aboard and hauled on the rope. The boat wallowed between swells and tipped precariously as the pot came over the side all clicking and slapping with tails and feelers and dropping legs.

Happy New Year, said the old man, dragging crays out and dropping them into the bucket.

Shit! said Ernie. Hang on!

The engine roared and the boat surged and the old man all but fell onto Vic who saw the wave looming beyond him. The bow rose. The old man’s head was on the seat beside him, one hand gripping Vic’s leg as they speared up, freefalling from the back of the wave. They slammed back onto the water and the old man laughed but Vic could already see the next wave coming.

Go! he screamed. Go!

Ernie throttled up and the old man crawled out of a nest of rope to sit up in the bow, head swivelling. This wave was much bigger. It was beginning to break already and in its path the water was dimpled and lumpy with the contours of the reef beneath them.

The old man pointed one way. Ernie steered in the opposite direction. And just as the wave broke on their beam a few yards out, he turned the boat shoreward and tried to outrun the thing.

Vic felt the wave bear down on them, a spitting, roaring draught behind his ears, before it snatched them up and left them, for two or three seconds at most, actually surfing down the face the way he’d never dreamt possible. The motor snarling. Sea and air thundering in his head.

And then it was quiet. Bubbles danced before his face and his hands were pearly and his hair swooning all in one direction. His head hit something sharp and hard before he realized he was beneath the boat. The water was crowded with rope and lines. Something bit his leg. He was bursting and the grey shell of the boat held him under till the water pressed at his lips.

Something collared him, dragged him down and sideways. Vic felt the water against his teeth. He screamed out the last of his air and then he was up.

He’s snagged, said his father.

Except for the fading carpet of bubbles the sea was smooth again. The air was raw in his lungs. He began to cry. The old man dived and came up pulling line so Vic could move, but every time he kicked as he trod water something bit deep in his calf.

It’s a hook, said the old man. Can you swim?

Vic nodded, still bawling.

It’s okay, said the old man. Vic, son, we’re orright.

He floated and sculled the best he could with the hook and heavy line dragging on his leg. Ernie climbed onto the overturned hull, the cheeks of his arse bare to the morning sun. Together the men righted the boat and while Ernie bailed it the old man swam back with a knife to cut him free.

Then they caught the floating oars and climbed into the boat. Ernie was naked. His shorts were gone. The three of them had a jittery laugh and started bailing with their hands.

The motor was dead. It took a long time to row in against the breeze. Women and girls cried on the beach. Vic’s cousins looked uglier than something dragged from a reeking craypot. Nanna fetched Ernie some shorts.

In the shade of the tarp the women held him down while Ernie and his father pushed the big hook through his leg until the barb broke free of the skin and then they cut it off with pliers and dragged it back out. The whole time they worked, through every blast of pain, he thought of Melanie. Her finger, her swinging breasts, a puddle of sand on her belly. He didn’t give a bugger about the cousins; let them see him writhe and blubber. He was thinking of her. He was immune; nothing could touch him. And afterwards, in the long calm on the other side of the pain, when he felt spent and sleepy and silky-skinned, he let the women douse him with Mercurochrome and ply him with eggs and sugary tea, and pat his tears dry, and when they finally left off he took the barbless hook and limped up the beach to give it to her. Melanie would understand; she’d know what he meant by it.

But the blitz truck was gone and the tractor, too. A great mound of coals smouldered on the sand. Where the big tent had been there were bottles and cans and the smooth imprints of mattresses and bodies. The harvest, he thought. There must be rain on the way. He took the hook from his pocket. It looked blunt and misshapen. It shone in the sun. Vic’s leg throbbed and burned. He looked out across the sea for the first sign of cloud, for any kind of signal of a change in the weather, but the sea and the sky were as pale and blue and blank as sleep, as empty as he felt standing there on the lapping shore.

VERY LATE ONE EVENING not long ago I stirred from a television stupor at the sound of a familiar street name and saw a police forensic team in waders carry bones from the edge of a lake. Four femurs and a skull, to be precise. The view widened and I saw a shabby clump of melaleucas and knew exactly where it was that this macabre discovery had taken place. I switched the TV off. My wife had long gone to bed. Through the open window I smelt wild lupins and estuary mud and for a time I forgot where I was. Life moves on, people say, but I doubt that. Moves in, more like it.